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PHP community did an exceptionally excellent job to improve standards in the past few years. A lot of features has been added to the language itself as well as huge performance improvement.

Many complain about PHP is from the past. Still a lot of developers just hacking around but it is not hard to find decent PHP developers anymore.

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Agreed. Modern PHP development is very similar to Java development (although there are still quirks). I've programmed in PHP professionally for the last 8 years and can confirm that the language is improved by leaps and bounds. Composer by itself is a joy to use (especially compared to npm). We introduced PHPStan recently and it's basically a magic bug finder, it's fantastic.

While I do think Composer is an awesome improvement for the PHP ecosystem in general, I still find it insane that you cannot run `composer update` on a machine that has less than 1.5G memory allocated to PHP. It is an absolute resource hog, which is problematic for a lot of reasons.

I really enjoy using Composer as well but my exposure is limited. Does composer do anything for security that npm fails at? The most I've seen is that packages in composer tend to have way less dependencies than npm packages but that's not really a great reason to call it more secure (better, yes, but not ideal). Just wondering if Composer has some security features that I'm not aware of.

I'm not aware of any security advantages compared to npm. But one thing that comes to mind is that a while ago npm, by default, did not generate lock files, which is very much a risk concerning deployment and dependency-management in general. It's not an issue any longer, though, both yarn (yarn.lock) and npm (package-lock.json?) generate lock files by default.

Any sources for modern PHP? I kinda started programming in PHP (completely self taught from internet as a kid in grade school) and my first internship was in PHP. When I started learning other languages, and technologies I basically realized PHP is nothing but an eternal hell. This was 10 years ago. To be very honest, PHP was so bad back then I hardly believe it's passable now. But I'd like to explore it a little, to see that I'm wrong and they somehow saved PHP. Is there a source that can give me what modern PHP has to offer and how it diverged from its (famously) "fractal of bad design' nature?

Laracasts.com is a great way to get started.

phptherightway.com is by far one of the best "one stop shop" for modern php development.

The Symfony docs are great. Also, see https://symfonycasts.com/.

PHP: The Right Way (https://phptherightway.com/) is a maintained resource which I frequently recommend.

Additionally, JetBrains has good resources. The PHPStorm IDE is worth your time, as well as the blog PHP Annotated Monthly: https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/category/php-annotated-m...

PHP: The Right Way has helped me immensely. It is the best of "The Right Way" sites because it's maintained by people who know what they're talking about, it gives you the most important resources and documentation you should read, refer to, and understand.

To be honest, plenty of languages that allow bad behaviour could be classed as hell including C and C++ but done well, all of the main framework languages can also be nice.

PHP has its origins in scripting rather than what traditional developers might consider a "real" language but as a C# developer, I often turn to PHP for my web "sites" as it is plays much nicer with front-end frameworks and using a framework like Yii2 does most of my heavy lifting.

Agreed. We use it extensively and it lets us move very fast. Devs coming from Java and similar environments usually say something like "I thought I hated PHP but it's very nice now and I feel very productive in it".

I used to be a .net dev, then I switched to Ruby then to a polyglot role using python/php/javascript/.net. Today Laravel is my goto for new web development. For me, it is equal in strength to RoR, or ASP.NET CORE MVC. All languages have sufficient library strength, and similar feature sets. But PHP offers superior "dev-ops". Deploying updates is so painless in PHP, that I feel like I can really move a lot faster.

I recently started taking some of my old PHP code and updating it to PHP 7.x. There's a lot of weird hackery they've removed, and bugs I didn't know I had were revealed in that a lot more broken behavior leads to errors now, instead of silent failure that PHP was known for.

> […] not hard to find decent PHP developers anymore.

In Oslo, I found PHP developers hard to come by. Though, I think the situation is better in continental Europe.

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